When you’re building a business, a team, or any kind of system, you need ways to understand how well you’re doing. That means finding the maturity model that matches the state of your business.

You want to be able to look at your performance and set base standards that have to be met and be able to contrast those standards with an understanding of what best practice looks like.

You want to understand where on that scale of performance you are at.

It’s why we use things like KPIs, OKRs, or other goal/objective-driven metrics.

But those metrics, as useful as they are for some things, are often hard to apply to qualitative data.

This is where maturity models can become an incredibly useful tool.

One model we’ll discuss here is the Capability Maturity Model, and the CMMI Institute alone appears to have about +8500 accredited users of this model (interestingly, in 2018 ~80% were pairing it with agile methodologies).

The problem, though, is that maturity models are often shrouded in complex terminology and overly-convoluted systems. How am I supposed to implement one in my business if people can’t understand it?

In this Process Street article, we’ll tear through the jargon and look at:

• What is a maturity model?
• What are the current limitations of business process maturity models?
• Which are the best business process maturity models?
• What is a Capability Maturity Model (CMM)?
• What is the Agile ISO Maturity Model (AIMM)?
• How does Process Street fit into your maturity model?

“Productivity vs efficiency; which do you think is more important?“

A colleague asked me this the other day and I had to catch myself, because my initial response was:

“Aren’t they the same thing?“

That’s the problem – the words have become so overused and confused that they are almost taken to mean the exact same thing in casual conversation. There are, however, key differences between the two that you should know in order to correctly analyze the performance of something.

Simply put, productivity measures output over time whereas efficiency measures input versus output. Together they can tell you how quickly something is completed, the resources it takes to get there, and (through analysis) whether the whole thing is worth your investment.

There are also dangers associated with these metrics. For example, I tried to spend an hour every night working on one of many projects. Monday was playing guitar, Tuesday was physical drawing, Wednesday game development, Thursday digital drawing, Friday playing piano, and the weekend dealer’s choice.

Not only did I give up within a week and a half, but I couldn’t muster the motivation to do any work on any of my projects for weeks following. It doesn’t matter if you’re using the best productivity apps around; when you’re using productivity and efficiency as your goal, rather than the method to reach it, something will inevitably break underneath you.

So, in this post I’ll go through:

• What is productivity?
• What is efficiency?
• Productivity vs efficiency: Which should you focus on?
• Productivity vs efficiency: What’s the final result?

It’s time to analyze performance and improve your workflows without all the meaningless jargon. Let’s get started.

While your blog is the external face and voice of your company, your support team is the internal one, which is why you need an effective customer support process in place. According to Jason Lemkin of SaaStr, SaaS companies — especially startups — should be using their company’s product, even if the teams don’t strictly ‘need’ to.

In Jason’s article, he recounts how PayPal president David Marcus ranted ‘use our app or quit‘ to his employees. While it could be argued that David Marcus is being an angry egotist and going a little too far for an app that everyone may not have a use for, he says that the reason he wants everyone using it regularly is so that PayPal can ‘get better, and better’.

That brings up an interesting issue — by putting every single employee on support in some capacity, you’re tackling several problems at once. You’re lightening the load of the dedicated support teams in busier times, teaching employees about the product they may well be advertising or marketing and gathering vital data from users on how the product could be improved.

Over the several past weeks, I’ve looked at the definition of customer success, why it’s important and how to reduce churn. Now we’re going to get into the nuts and bolts of customer support for SaaS companies, including strategies, workflows, and tips for getting set up.

• Everyone should have a customer support process
• Develop a customer support process document that works for your team
• Create a customer support process workflow (and make sure it gets followed)
• Segment your support tickets to keep engaged with the customer
• Create a recurring workflow to run for each ticket
• How to start this customer support process for every employee
• Get the Ebook: The Complete Guide to Customer Success for SaaS Companies

Let’s get started by looking more closely at the support model briefly described earlier.

Enterprise collaboration software is essential to any organization.

It’s the catalyst for hitting those important, internal targets that pave the way for long-term profitability and success.

But collaborating is far easier said than done – and especially for enterprise businesses.

In fact, 86% of employees and executives cite a lack of collaboration as the reason for the failures that have happened in their workplace.

Luckily, there’s a solution: Enterprise collaboration software.

If you’re new to enterprise collaboration software but still want to get your enterprise collaborating like pros, you’ve come to the right place.

In this incredibly-informative, super-streamlined Process Street article, you’ll learn the definition of enterprise collaboration software, find out the benefits of it, and discover the best software for enterprise-wide collaboration, depending on your needs.

Just make your way through these sections:

• What is enterprise collaboration software (ECS)?
• What are the benefits of enterprise collaboration & ECS?
• The best enterprise collaboration tools: Messaging & meetings
• The best enterprise collaboration tools: Sharing & organizing files
• The best enterprise collaboration tools: Project management
• The best enterprise collaboration tools: Managing processes
• Collaborate properly as an enterprise with Process Street!

Let’s dive straight in. ⬇️

Customer health index is a crucial metric to look at.

Why?

The customer’s Net Promoter Score (NPS) was in the highest percentile, yet I found myself closing the account. How did we miss this churning customer? Were there early warning signs we’d failed to notice?

I used to work as a technical customer service representative for an environmental testing laboratory. It was my job to keep an eye on the accounts I handled. I needed to make sure the customers were happy and meeting their goals with us. For this, we relied heavily on NPS scoring, but this measure was failing us.

NPS scoring could be failing you, too.

The problem is that NPS metrics give reactive, snapshot values. Plus there are other aspects to an account’s health beyond customer satisfaction. For instance, you need to understand your customer’s goals and whether they’re on track to meeting those goals.

According to McKinsey and Company, perfecting account health scoring can improve client retention by up to 95%. If I knew this, I could have prevented that one account from churning.

In this Process Street article, we introduce a more comprehensive and proactive means of determining the health of your accounts: the customer health index (CHI).

• What is a customer health index?
• Why you should transition from NPS to CHI
• How to calculate a customer health index in 4 steps

Let’s jump right to it!

Hanson Cheng is the founder of Freedom to Ascend. He empowers online entrepreneurs and business owners to put the HR automation systems in place for growth and 10x their business.

Despite being responsible for managing human resources, the HR department is usually one of the most understaffed and overworked departments in many companies. This is because HR involves many manual, repetitive, and monotonous tasks—these range from recruitment to pay and benefits to everything else in-between.

Automating your HR processes will help you:

• Streamline workflows
• Ensure all your processes are consistent
• Reduce errors

Ultimately, HR automation saves you time and money — valuable resources you could better spend on other pressing HR tasks. Research shows that automation can help decrease administrative tasks by 49 percent for HR employers and 30 percent for HR professionals. The same study also revealed that up to 34 percent of HR departments said their organizations were slow in adopting HR automation.

In this Process Street post, we’ll be covering:

• What is HR automation?
• Benefits of HR automation
• 7 key HR processes to automate in 2021
• Why not automating HR processes can set you back In 2021
• HR automation: It’s not an option anymore

Let’s jump right in!

BPO examples are important to know.

Why?

At one point or another, many businesses reach a stage where they need to delegate some intensive processes to another provider.

This delegation, usually called Business Process Outsourcing (BPO), helps small businesses avoid hiring full-time teams to manage and measure the performance of different business processes. BPOs offer benefits from cost savings to a strong competitive edge, and they can help new and upcoming businesses grow more efficiently. 

Delegating one or more business processes doesn’t come without risks, though.

For every function or process that a business outsources to an external provider, the more organizational information they potentially jeopardize. The greatest threats to BPO, chief among them hidden costs that come with outsourcing, can severely damage a business’s customer push-back and satisfaction rates. 

To that end, let’s explore the main risks involved in BPO projects and how to mitigate them, as well as get a quick intro to BPO with specific examples and benefits. 

• BPO examples
• 3 common benefits associated with BPO examples
• 3 risks associated with BPO examples

Some workflow apps you might be using to help manage your processes require constant attention – reporting, updating, or having to contact other colleagues to get them to complete their section of the workflow.

These are interruptions, and according to Professor Gloria Marks from the University of California, with each interruption, there is an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds wasted to get back to the task.

Other workflows experience inefficiencies simply because your current processes take too long. Full stop.

The more time things take, the more work you have to do.

In this article, we’ll guide you through a series of tools which can help you create workflows, follow workflows, and automate workflows.

• Workflow apps for creating templates
• Workflow apps for task management
• Workflow apps for communication
• Workflow apps for storage
• Workflow apps for recording ideas
• Workflow apps for automated reporting
• Workflow apps for task delegation
• Workflow apps for process automation
• Workflow apps for dual-screening
• Start streamlining your processes with workflow apps

Having a self-care plan in your routine is important.

Why?

According to the 2018 Organization for Economic Cooperations and Development (OECD) report, 18% of U.S. citizens live in relative income poverty, despite a general trend of citizens working longer and longer hours. In addition, factors such as housing affordability, household wealth, and overcrowding rate are showing signs of consistent deterioration.

It doesn’t take an expert to infer that these trends aren’t improving the average life quality. As such, the 2019 World Happiness Report ranked the U.S. 19th, a decline from previous surveys.

To jump to the point, over the past ~10 years, U.S. citizens have become less, and less happy.

A concerning trend that diminishes societal resilience to crises, as we witnessed with COVID-19.

Something needs to be done!

Swinging for change to steer those depressing trends around, the team here at Process Street has created quality, effective, and actionable free self-care resources, ready for you to hop in and use right away.

Use our self-care workflows as part of your own personal self-care journey, or distribute these templates throughout your team to create strong, employee-focused organizational support.

These resources are carefully crafted, drawing from novel and up-to-date research into human happiness, indicating the best habits and self-care behaviors you should adopt for a better quality of life. Check out our Daily Self-Care Template Checklist below for a taster.

Click here to access our Daily Self-Care Checklist!

Click on the links provided below to jump to the relevant template.

• Daily Self-Care Checklist
• Annual Self-Care Planner
• Morning Routine Checklist
• Evening Routine Checklist
• Tony Robbins: Morning Routine
• Achieving a Work-Life Balance
• Backpacking Checklist
• Camping Checklist
• Travel Checklist
• Big Personality Test (Structure Template)
• DISC Assessment (Structure Template)
• Budget Template
• Daily Budget Template
• Daily Routine Checklist
• Daily Schedule Template
• Fitness Planner
• Lisa A. Romano: Overcoming Negative Self-Talk
• Self-Evaluation Performance Review Template
• SMART Goal Setting Checklist
• Weekly Meal Planner
• Work Anxiety Resolution Checklist
• KonMari Checklist

To begin this article, we will explain what a self-care plan is and the perks that come from having one. We will explain how you can design a personal and printable self-care plan that will give you benefits such as improved productivity, enhanced self-esteem, better physical and emotional health, and all-in-all a better life quality.

There is nothing to lose, so what are you waiting for?

Click on the relevant subheader below to jump to that section. Alternatively, scroll down to find out how you can be happier and improve your well-being.

• Self-care plan: What it is and why it is important
• 22 free self-care checklists
• Use Process Street to devise an effective, personal, and printable self-care plan

Let’s set a new trend, for a happier and healthier society.

“History tells us that “how” you sell is just as important as “what” you sell.” – Wes Bush, The Definitive Guide On Product-Led Growth.

Slack’s revenue has grown 52 x since its launch in 2014: The channel-based messaging platform reported that revenue went from $12 million in 2014 to $630 million in 2020.

Their secret? …. Product-led growth.

Product-led growth (PLG), otherwise known as the “try before you buy” approach has helped companies like Dropbox, Netflix, Hubspot, and of course Slack go from Startup to scale up in record time.

But, the product-led growth approach isn’t just about trying before buying. There’s more to it than that. In fact, to truly be product-led you’ll need to choose between a free trial or freemium model; determine if you’ll be targeting the makers or the shakers of an organization; decide which sea you wish to sail when following the Blue Ocean Strategy; and, choose whether your strategy wants to focus on the bottom-up or the top-down.

Feeling confused? Don’t worry, this post will help clear things up. I’ll go over what product-led growth actually is and help you decide if the approach is right for you. I’ll also take a look at Slack and Hubspot, the poster children of the PLG approach to show what it looks like in practice.

To jump to a specific section click on the appropriate link below.

• Product-led growth in a nutshell
• Product-led growth as a go-to-market strategy
• Is the product-led growth approach for you?
• Key metrics for measuring product-led growth
• Product-led growth in practice: Slack
• Product-led growth in practice: Hubspot
• Product-led growth: Key takeaways

Let’s get sailing…